


vines/veins

by kiiouex



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Body Horror, F/M, General Unpleasantness, Gore, Horror, Hurt/Comfort, POV Second Person, Plants Growing Out Of People
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-24
Updated: 2016-02-24
Packaged: 2018-05-22 23:06:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,452
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6096946
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiiouex/pseuds/kiiouex
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You try to tell her, but the thing in your throat catches and you gag, whole torso heaving until you spit out a mouthful of fresh, glossy leaves. She watches, seemingly calm, but her fingers are laced together and trembling. “Cabeswater,” you say, running the back of your hand over your mouth. “It’s… I didn’t listen. It made me listen.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	vines/veins

**Author's Note:**

> I’ve written a whole mess of plant-based body horror before, but [telekinesiskid](http://archiveofourown.org/users/telekinesiskid) wanted some for Adam to match all the hella rad art people keep making, so. She helped define this idea and of course she beta’d so I must continue thanking her for smoothing the kinks out of my stories. 
> 
> Also I’m just generally pleased to be able to combine my two favourite genres once again: Hurt/Comfort and Body Horror, what a natural match :V jk jk pls enjoy

You don’t think about what you’re doing until you’re standing in front of her door. It’s past midnight, you didn’t call, you don’t want her family to see you like this, and the odds of someone other than her opening the door are too high. It’s a bad idea. You should go and handle this yourself.

There’s a little throb of pain from one of your fingers, as the tendril sprouting from your nailbed bends your nail upwards, making more room for itself to grow.

You knock on the door.

It’s a long moment before Persephone answers, a longer one while she stares at you. You try to formulate the most acceptable way to ask for Blue and not an ambulance. But you’re lucky you got Persephone, and you don’t need to. She dips her head a fraction and says in her frail tone, “Blue is around back.”

“Thanks,” you say hoarsely, words not coming out clear despite your best attempt to speak around the things in your throat. You feel her eyes on you as you round the house, but you can’t blame her; you’d stare too. There was a reason you waited until past midnight to make the trip, a reason you tried to deal with it by yourself for as long as you could, crouched behind the double-wide and scrabbling uselessly at your skin until both your hands were too slick with blood to be any more use.

You find Blue sitting under the beech tree, porch light giving off just enough light for you to see her eyes are closed, head back against the bark. She’s obviously there to find a little peace, and you feel guilty for spoiling it, but she’s the only one you want to help you. Gansey and Ronan can’t be told how wrong things have gone, not until after you’ve righted them. You crunch leaves deliberately underfoot as you approach, letting the sound warn her before you ask, “Blue?”

“Adam,” she says tiredly, cracking one eye open to look at you. A second later she’s on her feet, both hands clapped over her mouth in horror and you know you shouldn’t have come.

But both your hands are a mess of dirt and your own dried blood and hopeful little sprouts, and you rasp out, “I need help.” The words burn as badly as your throat, and you swallow hard around the creeper running up your tongue.

She nods once, twice, pulling herself together, and then she says, “Wait here,” and races indoors. Your eye the beech tree in her absence; there shouldn’t be a single arcane thing about it, but you still keep your distance, in case it could further your infestation. Your neck itches, under your deaf ear; you don’t touch it.

Blue returns with a first aid kit and a box of gardening tools, and you laugh, but the sound comes out wrong, a ragged breath that scrapes along the roof of your mouth.

“We’ll sort this out,” she tells you firmly, like she’s been saying it to herself enough that she believes it, and drops to sit cross-legged on the ground. You follow her down, lay your hands out on your knees, sit still and miserable for her inspection. First, she asks, “What _happened?_ ”

You try to tell her, but the thing in your throat catches and you gag, whole torso heaving until you spit out a mouthful of fresh, glossy leaves. She watches, seemingly calm, but her fingers are laced together and trembling. “Cabeswater,” you say, running the back of your hand over your mouth. “It’s… I didn’t listen. It made me listen.”

“And it didn’t _undo_ this?”

You shake your head, and regret the movement instantly, because the pain settled in your skull is only a different flavour to the rest of the prickling under your skin, no less intense. Your thoughts are taut and muddied and out of focus, and it’s all the effort you can give to say, “I think it can be undone, now. Since I spoke to Cabeswater, and it relented. It’s just… actually removing these.”

Her eyes stray to your deaf ear. It feels numb, but heavy, and if it’s coming off worse than the rest of you then you don’t want to know. “Okay,” she says, and you think the effort she’s making to come off as calm is mostly for your benefit, but you’re still grateful. She starts rummaging in one of her two kits, the porch light just barely bright enough for the both of you, and you are so glad she’s not making you go somewhere brighter.

Blue takes scissors in one hand and tweezers in the others and says, “Let’s try starting with your nails.” You offer a hand for her to take, and she scoots closer, settling it in her lap. A month ago, when you’d been dating, the touch would have made you nervous. Now that neither of you are trying to call yourselves anything, it’s a lot easier. You think maybe your relationship only really started after it ended, and Blue strokes a warm finger over your wrist. She might just be seeing how deep the vines grow, but it’s still soothing.

She starts with the thumb on your left hand, settling the protruding sprout between the scissor blades. You brace yourself, but you’re still not ready for how much it hurts. It feels like Blue’s shearing off the tip of your finger as she cuts the vine to its base. Instead of blood, a clear liquid drips out, runs down your palm to mix with the rest of the muck on you, flowing far too much for half an inch of severed stem.

When you hiss out your held breath, she stops to ask, “This hurts you?”

“Yeah,” you manage, re-gritting your teeth.

She grimaces, trading the scissors for tweezers. “Then this is probably going to be worse.” The little silver instrument grabs the stub of the vine where it sticks out from under your nail, and you know in your head that Cabeswater released you, that the plant isn’t still firmly rooted in your fingertips, that Blue isn’t about to rip you open.

You don’t quite believe yourself. Her other hand grips your wrist hard for leverage, and she yanks on the tweezers. You feel the vine wrenched from your nailbed in a single starburst of agony. By some miracle, it doesn’t take anything with it. It’s in her hand a moment later, its roots like veins, dripping red from where they’d been buried in you. The two of you stare down at it, and you wrap your hand around your thumb, pressing down hard. It smarts a little, but no longer stings. “That worked,” you tell Blue.

“Well,” she says. There’s not much else to say.

She does it another nine times, for each of your fingers. To escape, you sink back into the pain in your head, because even if it feels like your skull is being slowly crushed in a vice, it’s at least a regular throb. All the sharp little spikes of cuts and pulls can fade away under the steady, painful pulse in your temple.

When she finally shifts back, there are twenty little pieces of cut plant sitting between you, half of them with ends dipped in red. You feel sick looking at them, but you try to quell your nausea, knowing gagging around the heavy creeper in your throat couldn’t end pleasantly. “Right,” Blue says shakily, rubbing the little pink impressions the tweezers left on her hands. “Okay. So, we’ll bandage your fingers, and…”

Something crawls down your neck and her eyes flicker to it immediately. Unwillingly, you reach up. Down the left side of your cheek, tendrils are coiling out, settling flat across your face and curling around your neck. They stretch out like they’re matching the veins through your skin, and the tips are still growing, dipping down to your collarbone. They feel like they’re beginning to tighten. They feel, you think very slowly as your fingers follow the thickest of them up, like they’re coming out of your deaf ear. “Bandages later,” you croak, and it feels like there is even less room in your mouth for words now, like your tongue is being buried under bristling leaves. “Get rid of this.”

“Okay,” she whispers. She’s as spooked as you are, but she’s holding it together and you are so impossibly grateful for her. She moves around to your side, and before she does anything else she rests a hand on the base of your neck, strokes up in a motion that couldn’t be for anything but comfort. “We fixed your hands,” she tells you, strangely fierce. “We’ll fix the rest of it too.” You reach out to her, grip her knee, give in to relief that she is here and helping and you didn’t make a mistake.

For the moment, she sets her tools aside, fingers tracing the shell of your ear as she tries to understand the shape of what she’s dealing with. You’d guess it’s a coil of fresh green, three times as large as what had lived in your fingers, but you are still glad not to know.

When she touches it, you _hear_ , not the world around you but the rustling leaves of Cabeswater. They’re not speaking words, not even in Latin, but the shaky sway of their branches still murmurs beneath your own thoughts. It feels a little like an apology. You’re really not in the mood for one. “Okay,” Blue says, and she sounds very distant through the whispering wood nestled behind your eyes, “I think I’ve got this.”

She doesn’t warn you that it’s going to hurt. ‘Hurt’ isn’t the right word, anyway, because it feels like the plant is hooked into you and in the six seconds she spends pulling, everything in your skull is wrenched to the left, teeth sinking deeper into your jawbone, mind uncoiling and following the roots out in a long, strangled string. You’re waiting for Blue’s hands to come away with a tangle of vines and optic nerves.

The world takes a moment to settle. A pressure behind your eyes that you hadn’t noticed eases, and your headache slowly quiets, the awful, clenching tightness around your skull relaxing until you’re no longer afraid of your head cracking inwards. When you feel you can breathe again, you do.

Blue dropped it as soon as she’d freed it, primal revulsion spilling the mess of bloody roots from her hands. The dripping plant is larger than you could have guessed, more red than green. Her hands are still shaking, knuckles white from where she’d gripped it. “Cabeswater?” she asks in a whisper.

You shrug, and lose less of your balance than you would have before. Your deaf ear is silent again, but this time it’s a blessing. You are so much lighter already, and you take the sprig from Blue’s hands, laying it out with all the other little clippings. You’ll bury them later.

She allows herself twenty seconds holding your hand on her knee before she’s ready to continue. “Last thing. What’s in your mouth?”

“It’s growing up my throat,” you say, words pushing through the bracken dense in your gullet.

“Pull it up?” she suggests, and you can’t think of a better way.

You’re queasy too early, as you grasp for the tip of the tendril on the back of your tongue, barely managing to pinch it between two fingers. Gagging won’t help you until you’ve got a good enough grip on it, and it’s slick, slippery, unwilling to be uprooted. You hold it as tight as you can, and pull.

You feel every single inch that it slides upwards, even as it thickens enough for you to catch it with the rest of your hand, and then both hands, yanking the awful, bulging root out of your body. You retch in the wrong direction, swallowing some of it back down in a hideous shudder, and you have to haul it all back up again. The feeling that you’re bringing your insides up with it is almost familiar, but no less bearable as everything in your gut seems to be wrenched up along with the vine, your centre of gravity dragged sickeningly out of place.

Tears stream down your cheeks, hot, impulsive agony, and you are very dimly aware of hands on your back, on your hair, someone telling you that you’re going to be okay. It’s hard to believe them.

You think you feel the root thrash halfway down your throat, and that’s it, you spit the rest out in one long movement and gasp desperately for breath. Your chin is sticky with spit, and Blue’s hands are achingly gently on your shoulders. The deep sense of _wrong_ is gone from your body, and you know that was the last of it, and you close your eyes against the sight of the creeper on the ground in case you see it twitch.

You bury them all in a back corner of her garden, away from the beech, and you wash your hands under a little spigot against the house. You don’t know what time it is. If there is school in the morning, you can’t imagine yourself making it.

Blue is strict with disinfectant, and strict with you. She binds your fingertips tight with gauze, flattening out any damage done, and she checks your ear though it’s not really any worse than it used to be. When she’s finished, she falls flat back against the grass, and you follow her down. There is nothing in you but exhaustion, and that’s a relief in itself. “Thank you,” you say, and you croak because you are too tired and relieved and grateful to ease your voice.

“No one else would have done it,” she says, and it’s true; Gansey’s too squeamish and Ronan’s too rough, but that’s not the point. “You’re welcome.”

Your hand finds hers, and your touch is rough through the gauze, her hands stained from disinfectant, but she still twines her fingers between yours. Overhead, you can see dawn start to filter through the leaves of the beech, and you want to glare at the green but you’re too tired to summon real hate. When the leaves rustle, there is no hint of speech. You squeeze Blue’s hand and slowly, lazily, she squeezes back, her palm warm against yours. You need to be home in an hour to get ready for school. You need to fit a whole night’s sleep into a moment. You need to tell Blue how overwhelmingly grateful you are.

You close your eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading, I'd love to know what you think!! I also [tumblr](http://kiiouex.tumblr.com/)


End file.
